Deborah Moggach

With an ever expanding array of options available for those looking to date in later life - such as our own Telegraph Dating or Match's Ourtime - looking for someone special in later life has never been easier, but it still presents its fair share of challenges.

When Deborah Moggach's book Heartbreak Hotel was turned into major motion picture The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, she found herself turning 64 and grappling with the nuances of senior dating. In a personal account written for the Daily Telegraph, she explained the ups and downs of dating in one's sixties.

When I was young I couldn’t imagine women of 60 falling in love.

For one thing, people used to stay married; they weren’t out in the jungle, searching for romance. Besides, these women just looked so ancient – permed hair, beige cardis. They’d long ago hung up their spurs and mutated into pensioners. In fact, I couldn’t imagine them ever having had any sex, ever.

That’s what I thought, anyway, in my snobby and blinkered youth. How little I knew! Because time sped by and suddenly I’d joined them – without the perm and cardi because nobody has them now – but 60 all the same.

I’d had a longish marriage and then a 10-year love affair with a man much older than I – the cartoonist Mel Calman. When he died I fell in love with somebody 15 years younger than I was – a Hungarian artist – and lived with him for seven years.

So I hadn’t really come to grips with my age at all; it had ricocheted up and down, reflecting the person I was with. In my mid-fifties, however, I found myself single again, and remained so until well into my sixties.

The first thing I discovered was the chronic shortage of available men. Like the London sparrows, they had simply disappeared. Most of them were married, of course. And if not, they were chasing younger women. I can understand this – nice firm body, the rejuvenating prospect of starting over again, maybe more kids.

I myself would find it rather lonely to go to bed with somebody who hasn’t heard of Cliff Michelmore but there you are; it doesn’t seem to bother them.

The bald fact is that a man in his sixties or seventies is far more likely to pull than a woman. However drooling, alcoholic, boring, self-obsessed he is, he’s sure to find a woman who wants to have sex with him. It’s as simple as that. And it doesn’t happen the other way round.